The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People again must learn to work, instead of living on public assistance. ~ Cicero 55 BC

A University of Washington prof is going to have a talk about everything that middle east immigrants have done for us but it's going to be in Olympia. I was going to go to overcome my various and sundry phobias but its an hour drive for what looks like a ten minute talk so I'm going to stay home and phobic.

_______________________"Democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine percent.” -Thomas Jefferson

The Middle East has been the powder keg of the world long before the world became addicted to their oil exports. It's just that with oil money came expensive weaponry and the whole world got sucked into the violence. Without the oil money, they would still be fighting, but with sticks and swords.

"The United States government is the largest criminal enterprise on earth."-rduckwor

“Most men … can seldom accept the simplest and most obvious truth if it … would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions … which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabrics of their lives.”— Leo Tolstoy